Gangs of Cairo

this is from the excellent book The Arabian Nights, a Companion by Robert Irwin.

"Some time in the year 1264, in the reign of the Mamluke Sultan Baybars, a dresser was summoned to a house at the Bab al-Sha'riyya on the Khalij al-Masri (a canal that ran through Cairo into the Nile), on the corner of the Husayniyya Quarter.

There her assignment was to dress and make up a woman called Ghazia, famed in the city for her beauty and the extravagance of her apparel. The dresser went into Ghazia's house, but never came out again.

However, unknown to the people in the house, the dresser had been accompanied by a female slave, who had been left to wait outside. After waiting a long time, this slave girl went off to report her mistress's disappearance to the Governor of Cairo. He promptly had the place raided. Inside, they found not only the dresser's corpse, but a whole cellar full of corpses.

The shurta, the police force, arrested the entire gang, and in a series of painful interrogations the gang's modus operandi was disclosed. Ghazia had made use of an old crone as a bawd or procuress. Ghazia used her beauty and the crone used encouraging words to lure gullible men back to the house.

Inside the house, two male confederates would jump on the lusty and unsuspecting victims, killing them and stripping them of everything they had.

A fifth confederate, a brickmaker, had a furnace, and at regular intervals the corpses would be taken along to be fed into the furnace. At the end of the investigation, the five were sentenced to death by crucifixion, and the house was confiscated. Somewhat incongruously the house was turned into a mosque, the Masjid al-Khanaqa, or Mosque of the Strangleress."